The Day After Hun’s Day
Serial Stories
Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey, launches his novel Belgravia today, and it’s bringing back serialization. Our own Garth Risk Hallberg writes on the literary pedigree of Downton Abbey.
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Grammatical Tweets
Are birds’ tweets grammatical? According to a recent study by Kentaro Abe and Dai Watanabe of Kyoto University, songbirds may communicate using sophisticated grammar.
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This Atrium
The New York Times Magazine published an excerpt of the latest novel by Dave Eggers. The book, titled The Circle, follows Mae Holland, a woman who takes a job at a Google-esque company dubbed “the most influential in the world.” At Reuters, Felix Salmon critiques the book’s take on Silicon Valley.
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On the Limitations of Language
Over at The Point, Spencer McAvoy writes about the language and vision of Joy Williams, a writer who “instead of drawing boundaries between us and whatever Other, posits language as an experience of self-limitedness.” Williams’s new collection of short stories, The Visiting Privilege, is one of the most anticipated books of 2015.
The Odyssey, Mapped
An interactive map created by Gisèle Mounzer tracks the winding, often circuitous journey taken by Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey.
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Your Thoughts on Painters?
“Writers are not often great lovers but pathological inventors of explanations. Sex induces a kind of cowardice in them, a fear of experimentation, of being vulnerable, of stepping naked onto the stage to examine all the presumptions that pass without question when everyone still has their pants on.” Michael Thomsen makes the case that dating writers is a bad idea.
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Murakami on 1Q84
A blogger translates a long Murakami interview about 1Q84 (scroll down for parts I, II, and III). (via)
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